Well less than 10 is the Steem Power shown in your wallet after hard working for months. Why not simply buy Steem to power up? Is this a smart shortcut to success?

The price of Steem

At the time of writing (Feb 26, 2018), the price of Steem captured on Coinmarketcap is $3.40 USD. That is to say, if there was only less than 10 steem in your wallet after months of hard working, your total rewards is less than $34 USD for months. This is probably the cheapest labour in the world.

For sure, we see many people earning well above 10 Steem quickly because of their skills. But skill is a big topic. Let us be ordinary new users who have some fiat money to see if buying Steem to power up is a good deal.

The Scenario

• We are not celebrity, not sociable, do not have followers at the beginning
• All we do is one simple thing: Posting content and then self upvote
• Assume we buy 10,000 Steem at $3.40 USD
• Assume no transaction fee
• Assume the price of Steem is $3.40 USD after one year. i.e. No change.

How much is an upvote

By using the upvote calculator, we can see upvoting at 100% of voting power will make $2.29.

How many self upvotes per day

After the upvote, your voting power decrease 2% to 98%. Therefore we need to wait.

Source

According to the formula above, the waiting time for recovering to 100% voting power is 144 minutes.

(24 x 60) / 144 = 10

That is to say, we can do self upvote at 100% voting power 10 times per day. Since we cannot upvote the same post more than once, that means we have to create 10 new posts per day as well.

The monthly income

Income per day
Upvote value x No. of upvotes x author reward percentage
= $2.29 x 10 x 0.75
= $17.175

Income per month
$17.175 x 30
= $515.25

Annual rate of return

($17.175 x 365) / ($3.40 x 10,000)
= 0.1844
or roughly

18%

Posting 10 times a day on 100% voting power is a theoretical optimum only. It may be less than 10 times a day. But taking into consideration the return may also be raised by:

• Your steem power goes up as you post. It is a compound effect over the year. You may end up way higher than the purchased 10,000 steem.
• Assume you post some useful content, you may have followers and upvotes.

Conclusion

Annual rate of return at 18% is much higher than many other investment options in the market. But you should be well aware of the...

By experience, we all know that the up and down of the price of any cryptocurrency is

way beyond 18%.

In fact, I am not telling you to buy steem now or not. I am not an investment expert. On the contrary, most of my previous investment on stock market were lost. Therefore, my strategy of steem investment is:

1. Firstly invest your time on steemit to really understand how it works.
2. Gradually develop your blogging skills to create useful, meaningful content.
3. Buy steem at a small amount to try powering up
4. Buy more only if you are confident to further proceed

Particularly, point 2 is the most important. If everyone posted robotic content for the sake of making money, steemit will not be a success. If steemit failed, your steem investment will all become worthless.

Last but not least, I am sure there are lots of experienced steemians out there. Please be generous to give your valuable comment about buying steem to power up. We won't be successful as an individual, but as a group. The larger the group, the bigger the success will be.

Thank you for reading.